Luke Gazdic #20 of the Edmonton Oilers fights Chris Thorburn #22 of the Winnipeg Jets during an NHL game at Rexall Place on October 1, 2013 in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.
(Source: Derek Leung/Getty Images North America)

It came down to the last scrum of the season — a garbage-time melée in Game 48 where Mark Fistric engaged Vancouver’s Alex Burrows and Steve Pinnizotto that resulted in a minor and three misconducts but no major penalties — but the 2013 Edmonton Oilers accomplished an extremely rare feat. By finishing the season with just 13 fighting majors, the Oilers became the first team in a decade not named “Detroit Red Wings” to be involved in the fewest fights in a National Hockey League season. It was a near thing, as Detroit was right there at 14. But for the first time since 2002-03 the Red Wings finished 29th, not 30th on the list of fighting-prone teams.

The Oilers’ pacific ways didn’t lead to much success in the standings, mind. Unsurprisingly, there were rumblings of “not tough enough” as one of the team’s key weaknesses. When Vancouver Canucks threw a few cheap shots in a recent preseason game, new Oilers GM Craig MacTavish addressed the issue, acquiring fighter Steve MacIntyre on waivers, then another in Luke Gazdic after MacIntyre went down with an injury.

Hockey is an emotional game, and fighting an emotional issue within it. My own view has evolved over the years, from enthusiastic acceptance in my youth to growing indifference and ultimately distaste, especially towards the staged fights that have increasingly taken centre-ice stage in the past quarter century or so. We know much more about brain trauma than we once did, and have seen it first hand — for example, Oilers defence prospects Theo Peckham, Alex Plante (2x), and Colten Teubert all suffered concussions in needless fights which had an unknown but undeniably negative impact on their now-failing careers. We’ve had the spectre of the death of senior hockey player Don Sanderson in a fight, and learned horrific things about the sad demises of once-feared enforcers like Reg Fleming, Bob Probert, and Derek Boogaard. Already the new NHL season has seen fights-gone-wrong that put Buffalo’s Corey Tropp and Montreal’s George Parros on injured reserve with serious head injuries that easily could have had even worse outcomes. In a sport that pays lip service to removing head shots from the game, the lingering presence of bare-knuckle fist fighting seems an anachronism from another century.

But let’s put personal biases aside. I’m a numbers guy, and recognize that while statistics are never perfect, they can enable a more dispassionate assessment of a hot-button issue. Recently, among many mostly-thoughtful opinion pieces on the state of fighting in the game, a couple of blog posts on the Oilogosphere stood out for their background research. These included Michael Parkatti’s well-documented piece on the evolution of “goon culture” in the NHL over at Boys on the Bus, and Curtis LeBlanc’s take on the relationship between fighting and man games lost to injuryin his fine new blog, Oil!

My own analysis, researched but not published last spring, is more results-oriented. I could think of no meaningful way to determine “fight quality” so I decided to focus on quantity, using the (excellent!) stats lovingly maintained at hockeyfights.com. What is the relationship between fighting frequency and success in the standings?

Given my ongoing focus on the Oilers, I wanted to hearken back to a time when the team was something other than an also-ran, and in the end examined the 12 seasons from 2000-13. This corresponds with the NHL’s 30-team era, so consistent standards can be applied right across the data sets.

A couple of techniques were used, one examining league-wide rankings by season and a second reviewing the performance of individual teams over the years. Just for fun, I used the identical methods on a known contributor to end-game results, namely shot differential.

First filter was to divide the league into thirds. How many of the top ten in league standings were also top ten in shot differential? How many were top ten in fights?

Hmm, not much of a relationship on the left side. The most frequent fighting teams are equally split across the top, middle and bottom thirds of the league standings. Meanwhile, teams ranked in the top third in shots differential also tend to be among the upper echelon of the league standings, while poor teams on the shot clock generally fare poorly on the scoreboard as well. Note how the highlighted leaders in each group form a regular diagonal across the ninesquare.

Let’s look at the same technique applied right across the twelve-year sample:

Hey lookit, fighting frequency remains all over the map, while shot differential continues to organize itself much more in accordance with the actual standings. On the SD side, note the extreme numbers in the corners, showing 60% (144 of 240) of the top- and bottom-ten teams in SD finished in the same tier in the standings. Compare that to about 10% (23 of 240) of teams that were top-third in one of those results and bottom-third in the other. It’s not a perfect correlation, but it is an extremely strong one. Meanwhile, the relationship on the fighting side of the equation is scrambled, with no number as high as 50 or lower than 30. Each row and column is about what you’d expect from 120 random games of rock-paper-scissors.

Or so it appears at a glance. I took it a step deeper to more accurately establish correlation, simply by calculating the difference between each team’s standings finish and their rankings in each category. This produced a mean “rank differential” (RD below) in each season. In a 30-team league, a truly randomized distribution should result in an average differential (30 * ⅓ =) 10 placements apart. Anything less than that (RD = <10) suggests a positive correlation, while greater (RD >10) implies a negative connection. For math buffs in the audience, I also determined a Pearson correlation coefficient (r), where +1 is perfect correlation, -1 an inverse correlation, and 0 completely random.

Whichever column you look at, in ten of the twelve seasons there was a negative correlation between fighting frequency and standings success. A mild negative, but a persistent one. Whereas in season after season, there is a much tighter bind between shots results and standings placement. (An interesting secondary result is how that shots/standings relationship was strongest in 2000-04 and has weakened since, which I attribute to the shifting sands on which those standings are founded. The old-fashioned “good at hockey” still is key, of course, but these days shootout success and generally gaming the flawed points system plays an increasing role.)

Here’s a graphic look at the same results:

Just in the 2007-08 season did the two even come close to one another, when the shots relationship was weakest while that for fighting spiked — and even with those doubly-exceptional results, shots were still a better predictor of outcomes. That statistical blip flies in the face of what actually happened that season, when Detroit Red Wings dominated their way to a Presidents’ Trophy/Stanley Cup double, racking up spectacular outshooting numbers while eschewing fighting to such a large degree they had fewer than a third as many scraps as the four “top” teams.

Indeed, that has been the modus operandi of the Wings most years, although not always to quite that degree obviously. Check out this profile of the Red Wings over the past dozen seasons:

The Detroit Model is quite remarkable in its consistency. The Wings have been 29th or 30th in fighting majors in twelve out of twelve years, during which time they have been the most successful team in the league by actual hockey metrics like shots (red) and wins/points (green). The Wings finished in the NHL’s top three overall a remarkable eight seasons in a row, copping four Presidents’ Trophies. They also went on a run of finishing in the top four in shot differential in 10 out of 11 years (and presumably before 2000 as well), just dropping out this past year after the departure of franchise icon Nicklas Lidstrom. But the team had already starting to slide; the gradual deterioration of this wonderful run is readily visible in the paired red and green curves above.

All the while, the team carries on nicely without any need for hired guns. Fewest fights in the league eight years in a row. Bottom two every single year. So why is it I never hear that nobody “respects” the Red Wings?

That said, there’s only one Detroit, which has been the class of the league for the past two decades. Let’s have a look at a similar graphic for our own Edmonton Oilers:

Edmonton was middle of the pack in all three tracked categories from 2000-04, the back half of The Little Team That Could era. In the Year Of Pronger, shots results spiked drastically even as the team barely scraped into the post-season. Once in the playoffs, the Oil proved to be a dangerous team (as the afore-mentioned Red Wings can attest, eh). But that house of cards collapsed over the summer, and so did the Oilers’ shot rates, to just gawd-awful levels — bottom three in the league the last six years in a row. The team’s placement in the standings similarly tanked, even as a couple of MacT-inspired mirages in the final standings masked the depths of the fall for a time. But both the green and the red lines above have beaten a crudely similar path to the dregs of the league, and the relationship between them seems undeniable.

Against that, and floating far above for the most part, we have the blue track of fighting frequency. It’s true that the number of fights have plummeted the last two years, especially this past campaign as we’ve already seen. But before that came five years in a row where the Oil were top ten in the league in fights, and missed the playoffs each and every year.

Not that the frequency of fighting ever seemed to quiet the eternal question in these parts, “are the Oilers tough enough?” A very different question from “do the Oilers fight enough?” Not quite mutually exclusive, but the relevance between them is fairly marginal.

A closing note on the frequent fighters themselves, using the top ten from 2013 as a representative sampling of the type:

Starring the cast of The Usual Suspects. A cursory examination of ice time shows how little these guys are collectively trusted to play actual hockey. McLaren played the least of any forward in the game but somehow found time for a dozen scraps. Five of the bottom ten in the league; seven of the bottom twenty; every last one of them in the bottom quartile. That’s even strength TOI, though the minuscule special teams ice time for most of these dudes doesn’t move the dial at all.

That latter category is where you see guys like Prust and Crombeen at least make some sort of contribution, as regular pnalty killers on their teams. Indeed there’s a solid case to be made for Brandon Prust as an actual hockey player — the only guy in double digit minutes at even strength, and the only guy with double digit points. But the rest of these guys are there for one reason alone, and the likelihood of them “happening” to be on the ice when tempers flare for hockey reasons seems remote. They are by nature reactive, and for the life of me I don’t know what gets resolved and what gets escalated by a delayed reaction in a spontaneous game.

I do know that in the last few days I’ve seen heavyweights Colton Orr and Brian McGrattan making game-changing defensive blunders, and for what? Ask Ken Holland that question, and he’ll gleefully throw the likes of Drew Miller, Cody Emmerton and Mikael Samuelsson over the boards against other teams’ knuckle-chuckers. “Which one of those guys do you want to get rid of for a one-dimensional tough guy?” the Wings’ GM counters in this recent interview.

Fighting is a complicated issue that’s going to take a while to sort out. But as has been advanced by several writers and commentators, perhaps the next step is to address those repeat offenders who have a long record of “by appointment only” fisticuffs with their opposite number; in general, the type that occurs right after a faceoff rather than as an immediate response to something in the flow of play. The other night TSN colour man Mike Johnson was asked about the “motivational” effects of such tilts and gave a frank and lucid response:

I can only speak from personal experience: that would do absolutely nothing for me in a game. I respect that they’re fighting, respect that they’re sacrificing themselves, putting themselves in harm’s way trying to do that, but when it’s not in response to anything, when it’s not within the context or the emotion of a moment or the game, then it just leaves you feeling a little flat after they’re all done, and let’s get on with playing again.”

I for one have seen a lifetime’s worth of those already. Let’s get on with playing again.

Bruce McCurdy marks his third anniversary writing for the Cult of Hockey with this, his 1,000th post.

We encourage all readers to share their views on our articles and blog posts. We are committed to maintaining a lively but civil forum for discussion, so we ask you to avoid personal attacks, and please keep your comments relevant and respectful. If you encounter a comment that is abusive, click the “X” in the upper right corner of the comment box to report spam or abuse. We are using Facebook commenting. Visit our FAQ page for more information.